The award-winning American poet Shane McCrae is the subject of the latest edition in The Poetry Review podcast series.

In their engrossing and wide-ranging conversation, Shane McCrae and Review editor Emily Berry discuss Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ as the trigger, when he was just 15, of McCrae’s poetry career; John Keats and the Gothic; George Herbert; and McCrae’s conversion from free verse to metrical verse. “I can only recommend that everyone abandon the way they’ve been writing and see what happens if they write in a different way,” he says. Fascinating on the ‘productive panic’ of building a collection, McCrae also gives wonderful readings of his poems published in the autumn 2021 issue of The Poetry Review: ‘Explaining My Appearance in Certain Pictures’, ‘The Fungus Called Dead Man’s Fingers’ and ‘The Dead Negro in the Modernist Long Poem’.

Stay up to date with The Poetry Review podcasts by subscribing to the series via Soundcloud, which includes diverse conversations and resonant readings from magazine contributors including Mary Ruefle, Rachel Long, Selima Hill, Luke Kennard, Sandeep Parmar, Chelsey Minnis and Ishion Hutchinson.

Listen to the podcast with Emily Berry talking to Shane McCrae

21st February 2022